Ow Wins Avatars Inc Short Story Competition
“Life in Achar” by Anya Ow won the Avatars Inc Short Story Competition. The winning title was chosen from over 500 entries from 33 countries. Ow’s prize package, presented by XPRIZE in partnership with All Nippon Airlines, includes a 3.2GHz 8-core Intel Xeon W Processor iMac Pro, a GoPro Hero7 Camera, Sony noise cancelling headphones, a 32GB Kindle Paperwhite, a JoneR Universal Translator, and more.
Finalists for the award were Bryce Banks’s “What I Want Us to Remember Before We Leave” and Rhianna Jones’s “Honeysuckle“.
Avatars Inc is an online anthology first published in March 2020 and edited by Ann VanderMeer. It includes 24 short stories by acclaimed authors such as Pat Cadigan, K Chess, James S.A. Corey, Aliette de Bodard, Ken Liu, Paul McAuley, Johanna Sinisalo, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Tade Thompson, JY Yang, and Charles Yu. It was inspired by the ANA Avatar XPRIZE, which offers $10 million “to create an avatar system that can transport human presence to a remote location in real time.”
The contest was held with the aim of imagining “novel use-cases of telepresence technology in the future.” The winner was chosen by members of XPRIZE’s Science Fiction Advisory Council. To read the Avatars Inc anthology, including the winning story, visit the Avatars Inc website. For more information about the contest, see the XPRIZE announcement.
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